In a Dark, Dark Wood (23 page)

It has defined me for so long, my bitterness about what happened. And now it’s gone – the bitterness is gone, but so is James, the only other person who knew.

There is a lightness about that knowledge, but also a terrible weight.

I lie there, and think back to the first time – not the first time I met him, for that must have been when we were twelve or thirteen, younger perhaps. But the first time that I noticed him. It was summer term in Year 10, and James was playing Bugsy Malone in the school play. Clare was – of course – Blousie Brown. It was a toss-up between that and Tallulah but Blousie gets her man at the end and Clare never did like playing the loser.

I’d seen James before, in lessons, horsing about, flicking paper planes and drawing on his arm. But on stage … on stage he somehow lit the room. I had just turned fifteen, James was a few months off sixteen – one of the oldest in our year – and that year he had shaved a savage undercut into his hair, and twisted the remaining black curls on top into a little knot at the back of his skull. It looked punky and rebellious, but for Bugsy he had smoothed it down with hair oil and somehow, even at rehearsals in his school uniform, that simple thing made him look completely and utterly like a 1930s gangster. He walked like one. He stood like one, an invisible cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth so convincingly that I could smell the smoke – though there was nothing there. He spoke with a laconic twang. I wanted to fuck him and I knew that every other girl in the room, and some of the boys, felt the same way.

I knew what Clare thought, for she’d told me, hanging over the row of chairs behind me, whispering into my ear, her pink Blousie lipstick tickling my hair.

‘I’m going to
have
James Cooper,’ she told me. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’

I said nothing. Clare usually got what she wanted.

Nothing happened over the summer holidays, and I began to wonder if Clare had forgotten her promise. But then we went back to school, and I realised, from a thousand tiny things – the way she flicked her hair, the number of buttons undone on her school shirt – that Clare had forgotten nothing. She was just biding her time.

The autumn term play was
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and, when James got cast as Brick, Clare got the part of Maggie. She gloated to me about the extra rehearsal time it would necessitate, alone in the drama studio after hours, but not even Clare could charm her way out of glandular fever. She was signed off for the rest of the term, and her part was given to the understudy. Me.

And so, instead of Clare,
I
played Maggie, hot, sultry Maggie. I kissed James every night for a week, fought with him, draped myself across him with a sensuality I didn’t know I even possessed until he called it out of me. I didn’t stammer. I wasn’t even Lee any more. I’ve never acted like that, before or since. But James
was
Brick, drunken, angry, confused Brick, and so I became Maggie.

We had a cast party on the last night, Coke and sandwiches in what we called the green room, but was in fact an empty classroom up the corridor from the hall. And then, later, Coke and Jack Daniel’s in the car park, and in the kitchen of Lois Finch’s house.

And James took my hand, and together we climbed the stairs to Lois’ brother’s bedroom and we lay on Toby Finch’s creaking single bed and did things that still make me shiver when I think about them, even here, in the hospital room, ten years on.

That
was when James Cooper lost his virginity. Sixteen years old, on a winter’s night, on a Spiderman duvet cover, with model aeroplanes turning and wheeling over our heads as we kissed and bit and gasped.

And then we were together – that was simply how it was, with no more discussion than that.

My God, I loved him.

And now he is gone. It seems impossible.

I think of Lamarr’s soft, plum-coloured voice saying,
And James – how did you know him?

What should I have said, if I were telling the truth?

I knew him so that if I touched his face in the dark, I would know it was him.

I knew him so that I could tell you every scar and mark on his body, the appendix slit to the right of his belly, the stitches from where he fell off his bike, the way his hair parted in three separate crowns, each swirling into the other.

I knew him by heart.

And he is gone.

I have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.

He is gone – and, just when I need it most, so is the rage I have nursed all this time, even while I told myself I no longer cared, that it was a part of my past shut away and gone and done.

He is gone.

Perhaps if I say it often enough, I will start to believe it.

22

I SLEEP THE
sleep of the dead that night, in spite of the noise and the beep of machines down the corridor and the intrusive lights. The nurses have stopped coming in to check on me every two hours, and I sleep … and sleep … and sleep.

When I wake it’s with a sense of disorientation – where am I? What day is it? I look for my phone automatically.

It’s not there. There’s a plastic water jug instead.

And then the weight of the present comes crashing down on the back of my skull.

It is Monday.

I am in a hospital.

James is dead.

‘Wakey wakey,’ says a new nurse, coming briskly in and running a professional eye over my charts. ‘Breakfast will be coming round in a few minutes.’

I’m still in the hospital gown, and as she goes to leave, I find myself calling out, ‘Wait!’

She turns, one eyebrow raised, plainly mid-round and in no mood to stop.

‘I’m s-sorry,’ I stammer, ‘I was just wondering, c-could I, can I get any clothes? I’d like my own clothes. And my phone, if possible.’

‘We ask relatives to bring them in,’ she says briskly. ‘We’re not a courier service.’ And then she’s gone, the door flapping shut behind her.

She doesn’t know, then. About me. About what has happened. And it occurs to me, the house is probably a crime scene. There’s no way Nina and Clare and everyone can still be there, tiptoeing around James’s congealing blood. They must have gone home – or been shipped off to a B&B. I’ll have to ask Lamarr when she comes in.
If
she comes in.

For the first time I realise how very dependent on the police I am. They are my only line to the outside world.

It’s around 11 a.m. when there is a knock on the door. I am lying on my side listening to Radio 4. It’s the Woman’s Hour drama, and if I shut my eyes hard enough, and press my headphones to my ears, I can almost imagine myself back home, a cup of coffee – proper coffee – at my side, the traffic roaring softly outside my window.

When the knock comes it takes me a minute to adjust to Lamarr’s face in the wire-hatched pane. I pull off the headphones and struggle up against the pillows.

‘Come in.’

She holds up a paper cup as she enters. ‘Coffee?’

‘Oh,
thank
you.’ I try not to sound desperate, try not to snatch the cup from her hands, but it’s amazing how much these small things mean in the goldfish-bowl world of the hospital. I can tell by the feel of the cup that it’s too hot to drink and I nurse it while I think how to phrase what I want to say, and while Lamarr chats about the unseasonably beautiful winter weather, and how the roads are clearing up from the weekend’s snow. At last she grinds to a pause and I take my chance.

‘Sergeant—’

‘Constable.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I’m annoyed with myself for the mistake and try not to get flustered. ‘Listen, I was wondering, how is Clare?’

‘Clare?’ She leans forward. ‘Have you remembered something?’

‘What?’

‘Have you started to remember what happened after you left the house?’

‘What?’

We stare at each other for a moment and then she shakes her head, ruefully.

‘I’m sorry. I thought from what you said …’

‘What do you mean? Has something happened to Clare?’

‘Tell me what you remember,’ she says, but for a minute I say nothing, trying to read her beautiful, closed face. Her eyes meet mine, but I can’t tell anything. There is something she’s not telling me.

‘I remember …’ I speak slowly. ‘I remember running through the woods … and I remember car headlights and glass … and then after the accident, I remember stumbling along, I’d lost a shoe, and there were chunks of glass on the road.’ It’s coming back to me as I speak, the lowering tunnel of bare branches, pale in the headlights, and my limping run as I tried to flag down someone – anyone – to help. There was a van swinging along the road, headlights raking the dark. I stood, waving frantically, the tears streaming down my face, and I thought he wouldn’t stop, I thought for a moment he’d run me down. But he didn’t – he skidded to a halt, his face pale as he wound down the window.
What the fuck?
he said, and then,
Have you been …?
The rest of the sentence hovered unspoken.

‘But that’s it. Between that, it’s so jumbled … it’s like the images get more and more shaken up and then there’s just a blank spot. Listen, has something happened to Clare? She’s not …’

Oh my God.

Oh my God. It cannot be.

I feel my fingers close on the bedsheet, my bitten nails digging in so hard that my fingers hurt.

Is she dead?

‘She’s OK,’ Lamarr says slowly, carefully. ‘But she was in the accident, the same accident as you.’

‘Is she all right? Can I see her?’

‘No, I’m sorry. We’ve not been able to interview her yet. We need to get her version before …’

She trails off. I know what she is saying. She wants my truth, and Clare’s truth – separate, so they can compare our stories.

Yet again I have that cold, writhing feeling in the pit of my stomach. Am I a suspect? How can I find out without looking like one?

‘She’s still not really up to being interviewed,’ Lamarr says at last.

‘Does she know about James?’

‘I don’t believe so, no.’ There is compassion in Lamarr’s face. ‘She’s not been well enough to be told yet.’

I don’t know why, but it is this that rattles me more than anything else she has said so far today. I can’t bear the idea that Clare is lying somewhere in this very hospital and doesn’t know that James is gone.

Is she wondering why he hasn’t come? Or is she too ill even for that?

‘Is she going to be OK?’ My voice cracks and breaks on the last word, and I take a long, aching gulp of coffee to try to hide my distress.

‘The doctors say yes, but we’re waiting for her family to come, and then they’ll take a view about whether she’s stable enough to be told. I’m sorry – I wish I could tell you more, but it’s not really my place to be discussing her medical details.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I say dully. There are tears trapped at the back of my throat, making my head ache and my eyes swim as I blink angrily, trying to clear them. ‘What about Nina?’ I manage at last. ‘Can I see her?’

‘We’re still taking statements from everyone else at the house. But as soon as that’s concluded, I imagine she’ll be allowed to visit.’

‘Today?’

‘Hopefully today, yes. But it would be very,
very
helpful if you could remember what happened after you left the house. We want to get your version, not anyone else’s, and we’re worried that speaking to other people might … confuse things.’

I cannot tell what she means by this. Is she worried that I am waiting, pretending memory loss so I can get my story straight with someone else’s? Or is it simply that she’s concerned that in the vacuum of my own memories, I might implant someone else’s account unconsciously?

I know how easy that is to do – for years I ‘remembered’ a childhood holiday where I rode on a donkey. There was a photo of me doing it on the mantelpiece, I was about three or four, and I was silhouetted against the setting sun, just a dark blur with a halo of sun-lit hair. But I could remember the salt wind in my face, and the glint of the sun off the waves, and the feel of the scratchy blanket between my thighs. It was only when I was fifteen that my mum mentioned that it wasn’t me at all, but my cousin Rachel. I was never even there.

So what are they saying? Cough up the memories and we’ll let you speak to your friend?

‘I’m trying to remember,’ I say bitterly. ‘Believe me, I want to remember what happened even more than you want me to. You don’t have to hold Nina out like a carrot.’

‘That’s not it,’ Lamarr says. ‘We just want to get your account – I promise this isn’t some kind of penalty.’

‘If I can’t see Nina, can I at least get some of my own clothes? And my phone?’ I must be getting better if I have started to worry about my phone. The thought of all those emails and messages building up, and no way of answering them. It’s Monday now, a working day. My editor will have been in touch about the new draft. And my mum – has she been trying to call? ‘I really need my phone,’ I say. ‘I could promise not to contact anyone from the house if you’re worried about that.’

‘Ah,’ she says, and there is something in her face, a kind of reserve. ‘Well, actually that’s one of the things we’d like to ask you. We’d like to take a look at your phone, if you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind. But can I have it back afterwards?’

‘Yes, but we can’t locate it.’

That checks me. If they don’t have it, where is it?

‘Did you take it with you when you left the house?’ Lamarr is saying.

I try to think back. I am sure I didn’t. In fact, I can’t remember having my phone for most of the day.

‘I think it was in Clare’s car,’ I say at last. ‘I think I left it there when we went clay-pigeon shooting.’

Lamarr shakes her head. ‘The car has been completely stripped. It’s definitely not there. And we’ve made quite a thorough search of the house.’

‘Maybe the clay-pigeon range?’

‘We’ll try there,’ she makes a note on her pad, ‘but we’ve been calling it and no one’s picking up. I imagine if it had been left there someone might have heard it ringing.’

‘It’s ringing?’ I’m surprised the battery is still working. I can’t remember when I last charged it. ‘What, you mean you’ve been calling my number? How did you know what it was?’